The Netflix Ad Break Is Open to Mid-Sized Brands

Mountain Hardwear's fall campaign, "Stretch Your Comfort Zone," is running where most outdoor brands its size rarely show up: on the TV in the living room. The 30-second anthem spot has the grain of old film: climbers in quilted jackets under granite boulders, a snowboarder in a burst of spray with an on-screen line drawn from "comfort zone" to "exist here," and a lone hiker walking into a valley of snow-capped peaks. The brand has been buying connected TV on Disney's streaming platforms and Roku since early 2025. "We've viewed CTV as an opportunity to extend our storytelling capabilities," says Drew Schneier of Mountain Hardwear, "while also gaining a deeper understanding of how upper-funnel media can influence downstream performance and consumer acquisition." Lately I've seen other outdoor brands in the ad breaks on Netflix and YouTube, EF Adventures among them, and marketers at the Outdoor Media Summit last month said they're seeing clear value.

The economics explain why. When Netflix launched its ad tier in late 2022, it asked about $65 per thousand viewers (CPM). By early 2025 the reported rate was $29. Amazon switched every Prime Video member to an ad-supported tier by default in 2024 and has since roughly doubled the ads it runs per hour. This year's TV upfronts priced streaming at an average $25.90 CPM, down again. In July, Netflix inventory opened on The Trade Desk with no minimum spend. MNTN, a CTV platform built for small and mid-sized advertisers, grew its customer count 63% last year.

That looks like early Facebook, when ads were cheap and the brands that moved first built businesses on them. The comparison holds on access but breaks on the reason for the low prices. Facebook was cheap because advertisers hadn't arrived yet; prices rose about sevenfold in 2014 once they did. CTV is cheap because supply keeps growing faster than demand, with more ad tiers, more ads per hour and more apps. There's no sign this window snaps shut the same way. The more useful lesson from the Facebook era is about what a brand gets for its money.

The viewer never sees the CPM

In 2004, researchers Tim Ambler and E. Ann Hollier published a paper called "The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works." They found that ads that looked more expensive were more persuasive, mainly because they raised how people judged the brand's quality. Spending visibly is a signal that a brand is established and expects to be around. A spot between episodes of a streaming series carries that signal whether the brand paid $65 or $25 for it, and whether it's a global company or a much smaller one. The research was done on traditional TV, and nobody has yet tested whether a programmatically bought streaming spot carries the same weight. But from the couch the two look identical.

That puts the burden on the creative, though not necessarily on the budget. "Consumers are often engaging with content on the biggest screen in their homes, so the creative should feel authentic and story-driven rather than repurposed from another channel," Schneier says. "I'd encourage brands not to let production budgets become a barrier. Some of the most effective creative is simply a compelling narrative, strong visuals, and a clear understanding of the audience." The risk runs the other way. The same platforms making CTV accessible now offer AI tools that turn a product page into a video in minutes, and a cut-down social ad or product slideshow on premium inventory spends the money and gives up the signal. Thirty seconds on a TV is room to show a picture of the life a brand stands for, the kind people want in on.

This is also where brand spending starts to pay off in the performance channels. Mountain Hardwear treats CTV as an awareness channel but measures it against the whole marketing mix, and Schneier says the brand has found positive correlations between CTV exposure, better performance in other channels and growth in new customers and incremental revenue. "That gives us greater confidence that CTV isn't just generating impressions," he says, "it's helping create future demand and improving the efficiency and scale of the broader ecosystem." Free Fly Apparel put a number on it. It ran a six-week test in which an independent firm compared regions that saw its CTV ads with regions that didn't, and found a 10.9% lift in orders, just over half of the added revenue from new customers. In 2019, Adidas's global media director Simon Peel described the same discovery at a much larger scale: "We thought that digital advertising – desktop and mobile – was generating the bulk of our sales… we have totally over-invested in it."

Measurement is still the hard part. Most published CTV results come from the companies selling the media, and dashboard attribution flatters the channel. Looking across the whole mix, as Mountain Hardwear does, and switching the ads off in some regions to compare, as Free Fly did, are the more honest tests, and open-source marketing-mix models from Google and Meta have put them within reach of brands that could never afford an econometrics firm.

For most of the last decade, mid-sized outdoor brands have lived in the feed, renting attention one click at a time while national TV belonged to companies with national budgets. That line has moved. The harder question for those brands now is the creative one: given 30 seconds on the biggest screen in the house, what would they show people that makes them want to be part of it?